Neat! If You Slow Down Alvin & The Chipmunks It Sounds like Candlemass
FFO: Chipmunks, Chop & Screw, Summoning Lucifer.
Alvin & The Chipmunks is an entity that has somehow been a thing from 1959 up to current days. The gimmick is pretty simple: some guy covers popular songs and speeds up the vocals to the point of being a hideous high-pitched mess that could be attributed to the vocal cords of a chipmunk. Just draw in some cartoon chipmunks, ???, and bam: long-term financial success.
Yesterday, The AV Club included in their excellent time-wasting feature “Great Job, Internet!” some incredibly evil cartoon music that you should listen to. Brian Borcherdt, better known as member of electronic band Holy Fuck, unleashed pure chipmunk doom on the world. Using the name chipmunkson16speed, Brian found some old school Alvin records and a suitcase turntable with a sixteen RPM setting. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you’ve never played a 45 RPM record at 33 RPM, go home right now and do it. It’s fine, I’ll tell your boss you’re sick. That shit is fun as hell. Pop records sound evil. Heavy records sound like Satan incarnate (for funzies, try Unsilent Death at 33). Brian slowing down these helium-voiced chipmunks to 16 RPM results in some especially creepy results. Alvin becomes Buffalo Bill and the instrumentation becomes a trudging hellride.
I highly, highly recommend that you listen to this version of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”. I’m a big fan of the original, but this Brian Borcherdt/Alvin on Purple Drank version might top it. It sounds like a goddamned funeral dirge, in the best possible way.
